Octave: An Alternative to the High Cost of Matlab - <AUTHOR> http://math-blog.com/2011/01/17/octave-an-alternative-to-the-high-cost-of-matlab/ <comment><USER2> I use Octave everyday for my business and I absolutely love it. I have a background in Matlab (and I still have a student version someplace) but turned to Scilab and then Octave to do audio signal processing. It's a fantastic package and you can't beat the price, but if you want to use it as a Matlab alternative there are couple of gotcha's that I ran into:

\- the plotting using gnuplot is not as flexible as Matlab's plotting, although it is getting there

\- in an attempt to steer clear of copyright issues (I presume) many (most? all?) of the mathematical functions have been written from scratch, and while they typically use the same references as Matlab functions, Octave functions may give slightly different answers than their Matlab counterparts. If you need 100% compatablity with Matlab, make sure to do plenty of testing first.

</comment><comment><USER3> I must admit... I switched exclusively to Numpy / Scipy / Matplotlib about 3 years ago and never looked back. The power, flexibility, and extensive developer libraries offered by Python are unmatched (IMHO).

Oh, and for anyone who would like to try out vector computation on a GPU (eg. CUDA), you should check out the Theano project (a symbolic math library that can offload execution to the GPU): <http://deeplearning.net/software/theano/introduction.html>

<comment><USER4> What's the license?

<comment><USER5> BSD: <http://www.scipy.org/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment> muuh-gnu _> The GPL is sometimes a problem for commercial users of Octave or other free software._

<obligatory-GPL-comprehension-nitpicking>

GPL is never a problem for users. The GPL is a problem for rogue developers who might want to extend (or just rename, or not even that) Octave, close off the source code and then themselves start posing a (licensing) problem for users of the extended Octave version. But that is OK, since the GPL was designed to pose a problem for code closers and problem makers in the first place. Thanks for reading.

</obligatory-GPL-comprehension-nitpicking>

<comment><USER6> I think they mean is that the GPL can restrict the ways developers can combine various components. Ultimately software is developed for users, and if developers can't build software for their users, then the license _can_ become a problem.

<comment><USER7> Sony, Nintendo (and others) solved this by running the said applications externally.

For example a Sony or Nintendo SDK would have the gcc compilers, linkers, bintools, etc, and they would distribute the source... Yet nothing stops them from writing pre-linker, post-linker, pre-compiler, post-compiler steps that would be required by the developer to get called (or get called automatically by a tool).

In such case you mix well GNU (GPL) with closed commercial software, and distribute the end product just fine.

<comment><USER6> You have to be extremely careful in a mixed license setup. Lots of folks make the mistake of linking to GPL'd libraries, thinking it's like the LGPL.

But yeah, external calls seem to be the safest bet right now, even if it isn't always the most optimal solution.

(e.g. you can often use GPL'd components by writing a server wrapper around them and communicating from your non-GPL code via network communications for example, an arbitrary, and silly distinction from just linking in the components and using message passing, but hey...apparently that's what freedom (as in free, not as in beer) is all about).

<comment><USER8> Also the different version of the GPL are incompatible with each other. For example, you cannot distribute combinations of GPLv2 and GPLv3 works. The recommended way to deal with this is to add the optional (but not default) "or any later version". Then the user can promote the license to be compatible. e.g. GPLv2+ is compatible with GPLv3.

<comment><USER7> Does that apply to executables? For example package with GPL2 and GPL3 executables?

(But even if it does, nothing stops you from splitting the package in two, and providing two packages, rather than one).

<comment><USER8> I think you're describing aggregation which the GPL does not consider a derived work. Mere use of a GPL-licensed executable does not extend the GPLs terms to what you are doing (e.g. shell scripts, system() calls, etc). For each binary, the license terms of each statically or dynamically linked component must be simultaneously satisfied. The GPL includes a "system library" exception that excludes libraries shipped with the OS from that calculus.

The situation with combining interpreter code that doesn't access compiled libraries (e.g. pure octave M-files, or python code) isn't really clear to me. The FSF's opinion has been that a script that uses GPL'd interpreter code is subject to the terms of the GPL. I personally accept that interpretation out of deference to the FSF, but I've never understood specifically how that conclusion arises from the text of the GPL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Boy do I love me some Octave.

I do all my DSP algorithm research in Octave, because the price of MATLAB is just too high. I think I'm looking at somewhere on the order of $4k for a single license to obtain the signal processing stuff that I need in addition to the core license.

Would I prefer to have more graphing options, and some assurance that researchers' MATLAB code will work out of the box? Of course!

That said, Octave gets me really close for a fraction of the price. Also, I can peek inside the Octave source and get an idea of how the underlying routines work.

<comment><USER10> I've been using it for exactly the same purpose. When I think about how much it would cost me to get the Matlab equivalents I feel like sending the developers some flowers.

Python/Numpy works pretty well for this sort of thing too though, and the graphing features seem a little more sophisticated.

<comment><USER9> I've always wanted to try Numpy for this purpose, but I get exposed to so much MATLAB code in research papers for DSP that it hardly seems worthwhile.

Furthermore, I've built an entire Objective-C math framework (<https://bitbucket.org/liscio/smugmath>) that operates very similarly to MATLAB (i.e. vector-oriented) and allows me to easily translate DSP algorithms found in research papers over to shipping products (<http://capoapp.com>, <http://fuzzmeasure.com>).

<comment><USER10> Very nice looking apps!

And yeah, since Matlab is pretty much the standard it's a big plus to be able to use code from papers etc directly in Octave. Translating to Numpy is usually straightforward but it's definitely an extra step.

Numpy becomes very nice when you need to do some more general-purpose coding along with your numerical stuff though.

<comment><USER11> > Numpy becomes very nice when you need to do some more general-purpose coding > along with your numerical stuff though.

Once you get used to "cell arrays" and "structs" and "struct arrays", you can do most anything in Octave that you can in Python, but the weirdness of those syntaxes is quite off putting for a lot of coders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I work in finance, and Matlab is used a lot here. I work mostly with Python/NumPy/SciPy/SimPy stack so I do not have a lot of first-hand experience. But from what I am hearing from my peers, their problems with Octave boil down to mostly two things: 1\. Small incompatibilities, that make your life more complicated when you exchange Matlab code and/or maintain other people's code. 2\. Lack of alternatives to specialized toolboxes, like Simulink, statistical or financial packages etc.

<comment><USER11> WRT to incompatibilities, it would be great for Octave if they could file bug reports.

WRT to packages/ toolboxes, Octave and Octave Forge have not quite reached maturity, and there is ongoing debate about how to do that.

WRT to Simulink,... that is such a specialized graphical thing, I don't think it is coming down the pike any time soon. Somebody else mentioned an alternative...

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> sage: <http://www.sagemath.org/>

<comment><USER14> I cannot possible recommend sage enough. I used it in every math and statistics class that I took in school and hacked on it a little towards the end of college.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> To be completely cross-compatible with MATLAB, Octave would need to support classes. This makes it incompatible with class-using MATLAB libraries like PRTOOLS.

Otherwise I'd just stick to scipy, there are so much more python libraries out there, plus you get to use matplotlib!

<comment><USER8> Octave has classes since 3.2, but only the older @class directory flavor. The newer classdef style classes are not yet working.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A question: can anyone list some reasons why one might choose Octave over Scipy, or vice versa?

(Not trolling, just curious. I've never used Octave, but I'm curious whether I should try.)

<comment><USER17> The main reason to use Octave over Scipy is direct compatibility with Matlab code. Installation may also be a hair easier (I'm not sure on this point)

As someone who switched from Matlab (student license) to Scipy, I've come to the conclusion that Octave is a solution to the wrong problem. While non- student Matlab licenses are expensive, Matlab itself is also a crufty language that, once you exceed its core domain of "problems that only require (or can easily be represented as) N-dimensional arrays", quickly tends to spiral out of control. I've had this happen to me. Python, on the other hand, is a language that is already quite elegant, and the Scipy packages can allow for almost-verbatim translation of some Matlab code, but without losing a lot of other power and flexibility.

<comment><USER18> Remember that MATLAB started life as an interpreter written in FORTRAN for doing matrix maths interactively. It's a little unfair to compare it to something that came much later. The guys at Mathworks could have written an all-new language as good as Python (or embedded a language like Tcl or Scheme) at any time - they chose to retain backwards compatibility instead. That may be the wrong call aesthetically or technically, but I bet it was the right call commercially.

<comment><USER17> > It's a little unfair to compare it [MATLAB] to something that came much > later.

You're certainly right that's it's not really a fair fight between the languages. WRT Octave, though, anyone for whom a MATLAB license is too expensive probably doesn't have the mountain of legacy code that would be required for _me_ to justify staying with a technically and aesthetically less pleasant language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I started using IDL at one point (the facility used it) and hated the syntax-- but, I will say that their licensing was cheap. Then, I moved to Matlab and ran into problems building maintainable code (to be fair, I think things improved after Matlab 7) and with exchanging code with people who did not have access to all of the toolboxes (want to optimize a function--that will be another few thousand dollars....Want to do a bit of DSP....). Also, in fairness, their editor is rather nice--so is the JIT) So, to build code that I could exchange (and to do GUI building, etc) I switched to primarily to the python/numpy/scipy/matplotlib stack. Somehow, I passed over octave....I would recommend numpy/scipy/matplotlib. The plots are in matplotlib are excellent and the community is very friendly. Also, with numpy, I can do array processing very quickly. Finally, if you need to build an app, then you can make a GUI, or provide a webservice. Finally, you can play with libraries such as CUDA and bind them to python if your project needs it.

</comment><comment><USER19> Scilab? I passed my Numeric Analysis course (matlab) using scilab. The professor encouraged it.

<comment><USER20> This totally matches my experience on the issue.

It is a bit of a pity to see the effort split between two huge projects with roughly the same goal. Anyone has any ideas why it is so? or is it like a vim vs emacs(i.e. quasi religious) issue?

<comment><USER8> They're really old projects both starting around 1990. Scilab was not free software (commercial distribution of modified Scilab was verboten) until they switched licenses to CeCiLL with Scilab v5 (2008?) which is a FSF recognized free software license and GPL compatible.

Unlike Octave, Scilab's goal is not compatibility with Matlab. Unmodified Matlab code will not run in Scilab. One of the goals of octave is to run Matlab-compatible code. Scilab has a comparatively limited syntax relative to Matlab and Octave. Octave's syntax is more expressive than Matlab's but currently lacks the new classdef OOP (Octave does have @class OOP) . The last time I checked Scilab didn't seem to have any OOP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> FWIW there's also FreeMat at <http://freemat.sourceforge.net/> which I understand is also heavily inspired by matlab, and mostly compatible

</comment><comment><USER22> Sounds like a great option for students. I think for a lot of companies, however, Matlab has a leg up on Octave. In particular:

-The specific packages offered by Matlab (like the mapping toolbox, simulink, parallel computing, etc..).

-The training support offered to companies (I am not a huge fan of this, but I meet an awful lot of people who are).

-The existing user base.

-Finally, $10K (Matlab + a few packages) annually is not that much if it enhances productivity.

Even for students, I wonder if they would be better served getting used to Matlab because that is what they will end up using in industry.

</comment><comment><USER23> Why Octave instead of SAGE?

</comment><comment><USER24> Could someone give a brief explanation on how this compares to R? When should you use one over the other?

<comment><AUTHOR> There is always some overlap between these types of software, but R and Octave are fundamentally different products. R is a statistical tool, while Octave is a numerical analysis tool. Depending on the problem you're trying to solve, you may find one or the other to be more convenient.

<comment><USER10> Pretty much. There's actually quite a bit of overlap between the two. If you're doing statistical work then R is a natural. For engineering tasks Octave/Matlab is more convenient, particularly if you're doing a lot of linear algebra, where Octave's syntax is ideal. You'll also find more third-party code available if you stick to the language closest to your problem domain.

R's graphing facilities are _superb_ though, and easily outdistance Octave's. So if you want to build complex visualizations that might trump other concerns.

Numpy/Scipy can do most of what R and Octave can do but their syntax isn't optimal, since they're built on a general-purpose language.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Tried it. Not even close to a MATLAB replacement even for students. It doesn't support or doesn't name half of the statistical functions the same thing, which makes it useless for problem sets (where you have to turn in your source code).

<comment><USER11> When did you try it? I think there have been a lot of fixes to incompatible naming conventions lately.

And ... so your student's plots look slightly different? Like what? ticks on the inside / outside, or??? That that's a deal breaker surprises me.

<comment><USER25> No, often the code is slightly different and doesn't run correctly in MATLAB. The last time I tried was December for probabilistic signals and random signals. I'm the student so the problem wasn't me, it was the TA's who ran the code and gave you a perfect score if it ran and produced _exactly_ the same results or a zero if it didn't produce the same results.

Personally, I use sci/numpy for all of my statistics/numerical analysis needs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Unless you want CUDA support...

</comment><comment><USER27> Now give me an Alternative to Mathematica please! I so hate Stephen Wolfram.

<comment><USER28> What do you dislike about him?

<comment><USER27> What is there to like about him?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Does it have something like simulink?

<comment><USER30> Scicos is the usually referenced free-software alternative to Simulink: <http://www-rocq.inria.fr/scicos/>

It's not part of Octave, but a version of it is integrated with Scilab, another sort-of Matlab alternative: <http://www.scilab.org/>

<comment><USER31> So as far as you know, there's no way to do signal processing with Octave?</comment></comment></comment>


Visual CSS Editor – Grab'n Go - <AUTHOR> https://cssbuilder.veliovgroup.com <comment><USER2> Was going to say this can all be done using the browsers dev-tools (which you can). But have to admit it's a nice interface and might come in handy from time to time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for feedback. Hope it fill wind its place in your bookmarks :) Let me know if you missing something in its toolbox.

<comment><USER2> As you ask: Adobe Lightbox has a nice feature where a double-click on a slider returns it to the default. This would be nice for your filters.

<comment><AUTHOR> Feature is added, not exactly in the way of clicking/tapping twice, but now it's easy to revert changes to default ones

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> On Firefox, if you have the bookmarks toolbar shown, and your window size is short enough, the scrollbar on the right does not allow you to scroll down far enought to see some of the tools on the bottom (Color goes first, then Style, etc, depending on how short the window is).

Other than that, it looks like it could be handy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, going to double-check and apply fixes. We are already working on the fresh release. I'm glad you found it handy. Let me know if anything is missing in the toolbox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A really nice 'toy' for experimenting with CSS and learning what get affected by what. I would like to see this extended to use the various blend modes. These can be tricky to play with in the browser and really the fun of them needs the interface you have going here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Since it was published some time ago, it may miss some tools like blend modes. Working on update now :) Let me know if something else is missing in its toolbox.

<comment><AUTHOR> Blend modes and many other CSS properties just landed in latest release

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Safari has a really nice css editor as part of its devtools. The other visual editor I absolutely love is Figma. Well it's not a CSS editor but makes it quite simple to make visual designs and output it's css. I can see why Figma is growing like wildfire. It's simple, fast and collaborative.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just landed a huge update, let me know wdyt

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> might not be novel or essential but I think it's very cool! well done OP! I really like the fact that it also works great on mobile!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for feedback, I'm glad you've found it to be useful. Agree, it's not novel, but can save few minutes of work when you need to tinker with a lot of CSS properties. And thanks for trying it on mobile, this was challenging UX task :)</comment></comment>


It's Easy to Fake a Startup but How Far Would You Get? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.opp.io/post/105259740468/its-easy-to-fake-a-startup-but-how-far-would-you

<comment><USER2> Been in beta forever, waiting for it to open up, I'd almost rather build my own at this point

<comment><USER3> Alex, I dropped you an email with a private beta invite ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow, this is so cool.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice stuff..</comment>


How to Slash the Cost of Drug Development - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/busting-the-billion-dollar-myth-how-to-slash-the-cost-of-drug-development/ <comment><USER2> Unlikely.

      It has done this with US$290 million—about one-quarter of what
      a typical pharmaceutical company would spend to develop just
      one drug. The model for its success is the product development
      partnership (PDP), a style of non-profit organization that
      became popular in the early 2000s. PDPs keep costs down
      through collaboration—with universities, governments and the
      pharmaceutical industry.

So, was the $290 million the _total_ amount for all 26 trials? Or did the collaborators kick in money? Because otherwise this is like claiming you've found a way to buy a new Tesla for $1000-- as long as your parents pay the other $69,000!

      Drug development from scratch is arduous and expensive. It
      begins with experiments on hundreds of thousands of
      chemicals in the lab, looking for one that kills a pathogen
      without harming the host.

The article does not go out of its way to mention that this _isn 't_ the expensive and arduous part. The clinical trials are what's expensive, since you have to pay thousands of people, who have the disease you're targeting, to take your experimental drug. In many cases, they have to take your drug _instead_ of a drug that's known to work. And you have to follow these people for years, just in case they don't all suddenly get liver cancer and die a year after they stop taking your drug. (Something like this cost Merck $4.85 billion dollars in 2004: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rofecoxib](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rofecoxib) )

      The final trials on fexinidazole conclude this year, and
      Wourgaft is hopeful that the data will earn regulators'
      stamp of approval. The project has so far cost the DNDi
      about $45 million—and it stands to help 21 million people at
      risk of the disease in Africa.

_Which_ regulators? There is a rather huge difference between the FDA and the Central African Republic's FDA-equivalent. Is this how they're saving money on clinical trials, by running clinical trials on Africans, and only getting regulatory approval from African states?

<comment><USER3> Running unregulated clinical trials in impoverished nations is demonized and illegal when done by big pharma, but championed when done by some little company "trying to make a difference". I like the ideal but so much of this seems like marketing.

Granted, motivation makes a big difference here. However it's often hard to tell profit motive from innate motive, especially in a legal context. What starts off as innate can quickly become profit-oriented (or even worse "I told you so"-oriented) behind closed doors when stuff hits the fan.

<comment><USER4> >> unregulated clinical trials in impoverished nations is demonized

It is, but _regulated_ trials in such countries have real scientific advantages. The average US patient (older, overweight, probably diabetic) swims in a cocktail of drugs ranging from painkillers[1] to cholesterol reducers. By some estimates 60% of American adults are on one or more prescription drugs, a percentage that no doubt climbs with age. That makes them difficult guinea pigs for the study of new treatments. But the average African cannot afford such cocktails and so is most likely clean of other drugs. Costs and poverty aside, if you are looking for a drug-free study population, Africa is easier than the west.

[1] "In 2010, enough prescription painkillers were prescribed to medicate every american adult every 4 hours for 1 month."

[https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends- statistics/i...](https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends- statistics/infographics/popping-pills-prescription-drug-abuse-in-america)

<comment><USER5> It's not important that the medication works on an ideal population, it's important that it works on the actual target population. If you can't show efficacy and safety in your target population who may have several comorbidities and could be taking many other drugs which may interact poorly with your drug, then your drug is a failure in the real world. It therefore is not sensible to test for safety and efficacy on a population that poorly mirrors your target population.

<comment><USER6> Eh, it's both.

You need a baseline for any testing. When testing physical equipment with a difficult to diagnose problems the easiest way to figure out what is going on is to take the hardware down to a base state and then add one component at a time to see where things go wrong. When you have one population that is positively effected by your drug and takes no other medications it gives a great deal of insight when another population is negatively effected that is highly medicated.

We have a problem here in the U.S. that almost all of our old drugs would never be approved these days because of interactions with other drugs and side effects. With the huge amount of medications taken we need the baseline to tell doctors to stop giving patients drugs X, Y, and Z because they would be much better off only taking A.

<comment><USER7> _We have a problem here in the U.S. that almost all of our old drugs would never be approved these days because of interactions with other drugs and side effects._

That's a huge exaggeration. There are maybe a handful of drugs where the side effects/interactions are so bad that they wouldn't be approved by today's FDA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _And it has put another 26 drugs into development. It has done this with US$290 million—about one-quarter of what a typical pharmaceutical company would spend to develop just one drug_

They are comparing two different things with this statement. You can't compare "bringing something into development" and bringing it to market. Hell, if I move some crap drug into phase one i've "brought it into development". It means nothing.

Also, the one example of a marketed drug they successfully brought to market was a combination of two already approved drugs. The risks are much lower when you don't have to worry about toxicity and ADME.

I'll give them credit for working on a noble cause, but I've seen nothing to suggest they've fixed the challenges of R&D.

</comment><comment><USER8> I was uncomfortable reading this. I kept waiting for some assurance from the writer that they understood the complexity of the drug manufacturing landscape. Instead I got a blanket statement that the "expensive drug" thing is a myth, and a pro forma contrarian view 80% of the way down the page -- which was quickly shot down.

(By the way, this story format is getting a little old. The writer obvious has a pitch to make. They make the pitch by talking to selected subjects and using their quotes. Then, in order to somehow assure the reader of balance, they bring in a fall guy about 80% of the way in to say something cranky. Then they dismiss it. It's okay in argumentation, I guess, but really should be rare in straight reporting.)

Note that I'm not saying there isn't something cool here. Beats me. I read the article and have no more of an understanding about drug development than when I began. This felt like one of those articles where an editor runs into a booster at a social event and is told how really cool X is. They get excited. So they tell a writer to go write a story telling folks how really cool X is.

Mission accomplished. But not such a good article, sadly.

<comment><USER9> Daniel, I _do_ work in drug development, and I have no better idea than you how this "new and better way" to make drugs will really work.

The author mentions repeatedly that DNDi got reduced cost access to both high throughput screening, clinical trials, and drug regulation, so they can develop a drug for less cost. No surprise, but how is this a sustainable model for developing most new drugs? What processes have they improved to save money/time that is _not_ dependent on freebies from generous for-profit drug corporations, universities, and governments? Somehow I missed that part.

Personally, I'd dearly love to reduce the cost of drug development and prices. But until DNDi pays the full cost for all of the reagents, processes, and rules in their drug development process, they have no business claiming to have cured the ills that bedevil big pharma. No business at all.

<comment><USER10> What I read is that they aren't looking for a multi-billion dollar profit. Which means that they don't have to work on a drug that they can sell to everyone. Which means that they can focus on neglected areas of medicine for which the existing treatments are non-existent or terrible.

It's the difference between "proving" that changing a button color at Amazon makes people buy 1% more stuff (worth billions, probably) and "proving" it at a start-up. The start-up won't care about 1% more, but if you can triple sales, awesome! Even though tripling sales at a start-up might only be worth $500k, not billions.

When you're making HUGE inroads on efficacy it's much, much easier to demonstrate and you don't need thousands or tens of thousands of patients in the trial in order to get a statistically significant result.

<comment><USER9> 1) However chasing unserserved markets doesn't reduce the cost of making a drug, it just diminishes the financial reward.

2) The regulatory threshold for efficacy doesn't change just because the drug maker isn't trying to make a profit. They'll still need the same rate of postive outcomes for a drug to get FDA approval. Yes, if a drug is deemed life-saving, the approval criteria may ease to expedite the approval process and lessen the thresholds for efficacy and toxicity. But such fast tracking applies only to critical care drugs and without regard for their potential market size or profitability. The need must be dire and unserved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Big pharmas don't set the price for drugs based on their cost. They base the price on what people on different regions can pay, thus maximizing their profit. Cost is not a variable for the price, how much money people have in that sector is really the basis of it.

<comment><USER12> That's _the_ most very basic principle of marketing and sales, so why "big pharmas" wouldn't engage it would be curious.

In field where marketing and pricing are much less understood, like ours, the trick is that after you establish acceptable pricing for your widgets, you then compare that to all your production, etc. costs to to see if you should keep selling them etc

Note that in many "regions" "big pharma" negotiates the price with a penny punching government

Note also some drugs _are_ inherently expensive to produce, I'm thinking one anti-HIV one that had the usual suspects screaming, but it has 3 chiral centers (ouch!; for a layman's analogy illustration, Derek Lowe wrote a good one using ballons...).

<comment><USER13> > Note that in many "regions" "big pharma" negotiates the price with a penny > punching government

That's one of the reasons why drugs are so expensive in the US--we are one of the few countries to not have government negotiating our side, so pharmaceutical companies have to make their profit here.

<comment><USER12> Indeed, and if we "fix" that, well, I satisfy myself with the thought that many of the people supporting that policy, and/or their loved ones, will needlessly suffer and/or prematurely die because they stopped the development of a drug that would have saved them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> related:

"Open Source Drug Discovery" \- "collaborative drug discovery platform for neglected tropical diseases like leishmaniasis, which draw limited attention of research, based pharmaceutical enterprises"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Drug_Discovery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Drug_Discovery)

\--or --

"Crowdsourcing in pharma: a strategic framework"

[http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.drudis.2015.01.011](http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.drudis.2015.01.011)

pdf: [http://csmres.co.uk/cs.public.upd/article- downloads/Crowdsou...](http://csmres.co.uk/cs.public.upd/article- downloads/Crowdsourcing-in-pharma.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER15> If you could run a drug development company like you do a start-up, then you could probably speed up drug development 1000x fold. Of course, still need to have some safety mechanisms in place to prevent serious injury/death, but there is a gigantic room for improvement that will benefit humankind.

<comment><USER5> Do you want your drug company to move fast and break things? I agree that there probably are ways to shorten various aspects of drug development, but fundamentally you are talking about a highly regulated, potentially dangerous product. At the end of the day, the businesses cannot behave like software startups as the stakes are totally different and the systems they are operating in (humans) are orders of magnitude more complex than computers.

<comment><USER16> But humans are treated worse, how many drugs have killed people because the Company exploited a problem and underestimated the affects on larger popualtions (or just didnt care).

<comment><USER17> This isn't an excuse to carry on.

<comment><USER16> No it is a reason to change</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Windows 10 will soon be more environmentally friendly with updated dialog box - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/09/windows-10-will-soon-be-more-environmentally-friendly-with-updated-dialog-box/ <comment><USER2> That's a strange and frankly dumb title.

Just change it to: "Windows 10 will feature an updated dialog box."</comment>


Judge wipes out patent troll's $625M verdict against Apple - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/judge-wipes-out-patent-trolls-625m-verdict-against-apple/ <comment><USER2> Back in 2013, Apple had to redesign FaceTime to use server relayed connections instead of peer-to-peer to circumvent VirnetX's patent(s) [1]. I wonder if, after this verdict, they will (and are allowed to) undo this change and start doing peer-to-peer again; Apple will probably have invested quite a lot in their (cloud) infrastructure to support these server relayed connections.

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/report-after- pate...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/08/report-after-patent-loss- apple-tweaks-facetime-and-logs-500000-complaints/)

<comment><USER3> Wow, I never bothered to look up why FaceTime worked so well for me at the beginning and suddenly became completely unusable for me later on.

<comment><USER4> It would be nice if they just used SIP in the first place so that other systems could interoperate with FaceTime. Typical Apple.

<comment><USER5> While you're irrationally hating, you should know FaceTime was originally planned to be cross platform. The need to completely change how it worked obviously stopped that from happening.

<comment><USER6> What proof?

<comment><USER7> Apple did initially claim Facetime would be an open standard.

> Upon the launch of the iPhone 4, Jobs stated that Apple would immediately > start working with standards bodies to make the FaceTime protocol an "open > industry standard".

claims Wikipedia. Other websites also highlight the "open standard" it was supposed to become:

[1]: [http://www.fiercedeveloper.com/story/facetime-open- standard-...](http://www.fiercedeveloper.com/story/facetime-open-standard- never-happened/2012-12-06) [2]: [https://redd.it/1xuzif](https://redd.it/1xuzif) [3]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2605498](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2605498) [4]: [https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4547345?start=0&tstart=...](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4547345?start=0&tstart=0) [5]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FaceTime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FaceTime)

<comment><USER8> Whenever someone mentions FaceTime, I immediately think of this blog post "Steve Jobs sometimes lies to you": [https://zachholman.com/posts/steve-jobs- sometimes-lies/](https://zachholman.com/posts/steve-jobs-sometimes-lies/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is good news in that I generally feel any setback for an apparent patent troll is a good thing.

But this isn't too broad. Looks like a _very_ specific issue to this _trial_... not even this patent claim or case, let alone a broader implication for patent claims in general.

It sounds like VirnetX's lawyers simply referenced a previous case too often in the judge's estimation, and so he's throwing the verdict out, meaning a retrial would be necessary. Case doesn't seem to set any precedent (or, what precedent it does set on referencing previous trials might cut both ways for patent plaintiffs and defendants). Noting regarding merits of claims or anything as far as I can tell from the reporting.

If anyone more expert can weigh in or correct, that'd be appreciated too!

<comment><USER10> It increases their costs and thus risks. Remember if their costs get to high they can't afford to buy new patents and there is a ticking clock before their current portfolio is worthless.

<comment><USER9> Yes. :-) Not sure if you meant to reply to me or another commenter.

<comment><USER10> My fault for not being clear. I was responding to "But this isn't too broad." I agree this case is not directly important, but it will have a fair amount of indirect impact based on the award size if nothing else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Patent trolls are a symptom of the disease that is our horribly broken patent system, which also serves to stifle innovation and protect the interests of large, entrenched businesses at the expense of everyone else. Unfortunately, instead of working to fix our broken patent system, we are doubling down and trying to impose it on a global basis via the TPP (often categorized as a "free trade" deal when it is in fact quite the opposite) and other misbegotten treaties.

<comment><USER12> There is one US candidate who is against TPP, but unfortunately, I highly doubt anyone nearby understands the devastation that software patent trolls cause on the tech industry.

<comment><USER13> Actually, they're all against TPP except for Gary Johnson.

<comment><USER12> Clinton is most certainly _not_ against TPP.

<comment><USER13> She's been ostensibly against the TPP for almost a year. Do your research.

[https://ballotpedia.org/2016_presidential_candidates_on_the_...](https://ballotpedia.org/2016_presidential_candidates_on_the_Trans- Pacific_Partnership_trade_deal#tab=Democratic_candidate)

(Edit: better link)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Forgive the noob comment, but how does the patent troll know that it can sue Apple? How do they know what infrastructure Apple is using? Do they just sue indiscriminately and find winner cases through discovery?

</comment><comment><USER15> Every time I see a Patent Troll vs Big Tech Corp case, I root for Patent Troll.

Don't get me wrong, patent trolls are menace of tech world deserving to be tarred and feathered. But truth is, PTs are not main beneficiaries of broken system. Main beneficiaries are Big Tech Corps (APLN, MSFT, GOOG, ETC). Coincidentally, those companies have enough leverage to fix this system if they wanted to. Problem is - they don't.

That's why I root for Patent Troll every time.

<comment><USER16> I can see a line of reasoning that suggests that if abusive patent trolls had enough success against the giant tech companies, that the tech companies might consequently lobby for patent reform (for the purpose of protecting themselves from trolls), with the additional consequence that the reform would also limit their own ability to abuse patents.

Sadly, that is not likely to happen.

IIRC, Apple lobbied for patent 'reform' that targeted NPEs, while leaving producers completely off the hook for patent abuse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Patent troll or not, I find it's pretty crazy that a single judge can throw out the jury verdict simply because he didn't like the arguments of one side.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, that seemed crazy to me too. It'd be extremely disheartening to spend a fortune on legal bills, finally win the case, then have it thrown out months later by a judge on a whim.

<comment><USER19> Not a _whim_ , failure of the original court to follow procedure on admissible argument.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Patents are very much open to abuse. Giant tech could seriously lobby for a change... but for Apple and other giant tech-corporations there's a quandary: they can use patents to protect themselves, but at the same time those same patent methods can be used against them

</comment><comment><USER21> That has to be quite the moment, when you realize that the more than half billion you were about to see a piece of evaporates.

<comment><USER22> I have little sympathy for someone who makes their money by leeching off of others instead of providing real value to society.

<comment><USER21> Why do you think that I was expressing sympathy?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is extremely good news for anyone doing... well... pretty much anything interesting with network protocols. This troll covers among other things: anything P2P, SIP, DNSSec, VoIP that does not flow through a central server, certain types of VPNs, certain types of SDN, ... it's crazy.

<comment><USER19> So what _does_ it cover, in a user-friendly summary?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The lawyers all cheer! It will be a retrial.

</comment><comment><USER25> Similar is going to be the story of Mr. Chan's patent which is also known as the first patent of Hoverboards. Mr. Chan has sued more than 30 companies for infringing his patent. But an analysis [1] says that his patent holds no water and is not novel. The day his patent will get challenged in a court and get invalidated, a similar article with a different headline will appear on Arstechnica.

[1][http://www.greyb.com/first-patent-on-hoverboard-can-get- inva...](http://www.greyb.com/first-patent-on-hoverboard-can-get-invalidated/)

<comment><USER26> At least in that case there's a physical product. I don't mind patents, but I prefer the original version where you needed a physical implementation.

I don't know about his design in particular, but I have the mechanical and electronic skills to design something that would likely infringe on his patent and I haven't read the patent or even looked at a breakdown of a hoverboard. The patent probably doesn't meet the novelty requirements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Although Apple is probably ok without the money, I cheer every time I see someone win in one of the trolling cases. It takes big companies to fight this - ones with deep enough pockets and long enough time horizons to realize that feeding the trolls enables them to grow.

When I read that these are jury trials, it seems to me that East Texas must have an army of people who now know quite a bit about patent law having sat through so many of these cases. Strange specialization.

</comment><comment><USER28> As Stallman pointed years ago, software patents are evil. And I agree with him on that point 100%. EU software patenting is less evil, but still is.

</comment><comment><USER29> How much do judges charge for this sort of thing? Anybody know?

<comment><USER15> That's very mean spirited of you.

Judges are a vital part of three branches of government. Their power relies on respect, not guns or ability to write laws. The reason for contempt of court laws, whole circus with black robes, "your honor" is to create appearance of "wow, those people are important". Because they REALLY are a very important part of good governance. They just don't have muscle to prove it to you. And you don't really want them to have to rely on muscle of executive branch. Because in case of you vs executive, judges need to be impartial, independent, having their own weight in society.

Unless you know something we don't, you should not imply that this judge is corrupt.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What phone do you use? - <AUTHOR> What phone is everyone using? <comment><USER2> Sony Xperia X2A Ultra. $285 new, from a guy in Florida. Sick, sick 23.5MP camera. First thing I did was disable almost everything, and install Firefox. So right now it just does phone, messaging, and web browsing. Battery charge lasts 8 days :) Bought a black Tudia case which is very nice and grippy; I've never dropped it.</comment>


Loot boxes are 'psychologically akin to gambling', according to Australian study - <AUTHOR> https://www.pcgamer.com/loot-boxes-are-psychologically-akin-to-gambling-according-to-australian-study/ <comment><USER2> If like me you have no idea what a loot box is..

"In video games, a loot box (sometimes loot crate or prize crate, among other names) is a consumable virtual item which can be redeemed to receive a randomised selection of further virtual items, ranging from simple customization options for a player's avatar or character, to game-changing equipment such as weapons and armor. A loot box is typically a form of monetization, with players either buying the boxes directly or receiving the boxes during play and later buying "keys" with which to redeem them."

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loot_box](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loot_box)</comment>


Ask HN: Music Processing Pipeline? - <AUTHOR>

I had the thought today that music effects processing has a model similar to a functional programming or a unix pipeline. (inputs passed through filters or transforms).
Does anyone know of a library that would allow one to compose music in this paradigm?
What I'm thinking of is something that would let you define a sequence that represents the notes, and then send them through/apply effects to that sequence before they are output.
example:
given a forward pipe operator |> in Haskell or Ocaml/F#: f |> x = x f  (similar to a Unix | in operation)
where notes are represented somehow textually as a sequence (maybe letter and number for octave?) something like:
[4a, 4b, 4c, 3g#, 3d, 4a, 4f] |> high_pass_filter |> phaser |> output
I have no idea if this exists, but think it might be an interesting way to compose music. If anyone knows of library/application/language that works something like this, I'd be interested to hear. <comment><USER2> Have you read about ChucK? It's a real time language for synthesis, composition, and audio programming.

The name of the program comes from their 'chuck' operator, which works similarly to what you've described.

If you look at the wikipedia page, it looks exactly like what you are proposing - I was looking to use it myself for a different project involving music analysis.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChucK#Code_example>

<http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/>

<comment><AUTHOR> This looks very similar to what I was thinking about. I'll take a look at this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is an interesting concept. I've never thought of using Unix pipes style text syntax for musical effects. I know that some of the visual music programming environments work in a similar fashion, where effects are defined and then linked together in chains (see Supercollider or PureData, both open source). Perhaps some of the livecoding musical langauges work similarly, I haven't dived in to see how the syntax on them functions (like Impromptu <http://impromptu.moso.com.au/>).

Keep us updated if you make anything cool in this space.

</comment><comment><USER4> You might want to check out the custom DSLs made by livecoders. There's an old Wired article about them (<http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/07/71248>), and this is a livecoding wiki: <http://toplap.org/index.php/Main_Page> . I can't find it now, but I recall seeing a really in-depth Lisp language for livecoding. There are screencasts you can check out.

</comment><comment><USER5> 'Functional music composition' is chapter 20 in the book 'The Haskell School of Expression: Learning Functional Programming Through Multimedia' by Paul Hudak.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I think I have that book, I'll try to find it in my stacks and take a look at that chapter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Csound works similarly to this

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Csound></comment>


Why Myspace Music Will Fail - <AUTHOR> http://gigaom.com/2008/09/15/why-myspace-music-is-likely-to-fail/

<comment><USER2> To the extent that myspace is a player in music discovery, it seems like it has potential for profit. I have no clue whether the valuation discussed is reasonable or insane, but I do know that myspace has reasonable penetration in the not-tech-elite segment, and good relations with content producers.

</comment><comment><USER3> No free downloads, non-starter.

They're still fighting the wars of a decade ago.</comment>


How many hours a day do you think you work? - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/peacefullatom/how-many-hours-a-day-do-you-think-you-work-583e <comment><USER2> Well, I don't like this revelation. I mean I want to focus on other things when I come back home after work. Why does it have to loom over me all the time like some ghost? I need some work-life balance for Gods sake!

<comment><AUTHOR> Please, notice this line: "But your higher level of consciousness was not aware of this work." So, it doesn't bug you all the time. But your brain keeps looking for the solution if a task at hand is important for you.</comment></comment>


Apple's Lightning Headphone Adapter: Analog or Digital? - <AUTHOR> https://www.innerfidelity.com/content/apples-lightning-headphone-adapter-analog-or-digital <comment><AUTHOR> I came across this article when having another discussion about iPhone wired vs wireless sound quality (TL;DR wired is better) but then the discussion got to whether it was down to the native DAC in my iPhone 5s, or the DAC in my car stereo translating a digital signal better than the bluetooth DAC...

Just thought I'd throw this out the HN crowd to see what they make of the science here. What's the story with lightning? analogue or digital?

<comment><USER2> See [https://ifixit.org/blog/8448/apple-audio-adapter- teardown/](https://ifixit.org/blog/8448/apple-audio-adapter-teardown/)

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks but that doesn't really answer the question of when the dac is actually being used</comment></comment></comment>


HyperCard inspired development platform LiveCode to go open source - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1755283828/open-source-edition-of-livecode

<comment><USER2> Yay! LiveCode Rulz!</comment>


How to Solve Tabs vs. Spaces Forever - <AUTHOR> http://inessential.com/2015/12/21/how_to_solve_tabs_vs_spaces_forever <comment><USER2> I'm all for concise writing, but explaining the term "outliner" and "tree structure editor" would greatly improve this post.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. I initially thought he was referring to editors like Leo ([http://leoeditor.com/](http://leoeditor.com/)) or Code Browser ([http://tibleiz.net/code-browser/](http://tibleiz.net/code-browser/)), but now I'm not sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is like the idea of storing the code in a richer file format rather than just text. It would be up to the editor to format it and present it appropriately. This would also allow for code comments, pre-post checks, assertions, and other metadata to be embedded into the code without having to be typed in some meta language or language extensions in the plain text.

I would like to experiment with something like that but given how much existing plain text code there is I don't see this happening any time soon.

<comment><USER5> > but given how much existing plain text code there is I don't see this > happening any time soon.

But this could work with existing code through simple translation. It could even possibly be converted to an outline when read into the outline-based editor and then be rewritten as plain text when saved.

I have worked on a scheme that makes ES6 look like coffeescript when in the editor while stored as normal javascript on the disk. This would solve the problem of working in (almost) Coffeescript on someone else's project written in Javascript. I'm stuck right now because I can't get the number of changed lines in GIT down to an acceptable level. See [https://github.com/mark- hahn/jsw](https://github.com/mark-hahn/jsw).

<comment><USER4> It could, but the goal would be to store the code as rich text not plain text. So it would have to be decomposed to an AST and then stored in some structured format - XML for example.

This means that all of these existing tools that deal with just plain text would need modifications to handle the richer file format.

Having it as rich text in the editor and then saving it out as a plain text file means you're just making a rich code editor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The plain text to outlined code is pretty much what a compiler does. The proposal is akin to the idea of editing code as an AST rather than a textual representation. Until our source control software supports the idea of seeing code files as more than just lines of text, this idea is likely to go nowhere IMO.

It would be neat to see this in a RCS though. Imagine seeing a diff like:

       renamed foo() to bar()
       bar() changes:
       + if (baz) { ... }
       - if (quux) { ...}

</comment><comment><USER7> Is there a reasonable use-case for folding the contents of an if-block? I would love a truly syntax-aware editor and RCS, though.

<comment><USER8> Wanting to focus on things that are not the contents of the if-block.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Every IDE I have ever seen has code folding and auto-indentation. Including Xcode. This is a solution looking for a problem.

<comment><USER10> I think of it more as a demonstration of a general principle. There's no reason why we shouldn't abandon flat text files. Some huge fraction of development shops aren't really coding in flat text files anymore -- the IDE being completely essential to the shop's process at this point. Many IDEs have to basically parse the source to develop live objects to have their full capability, anyhow. Environments like Smalltalk have been operating without source files for decades now. Instead of source files as we know them, you basically have textual transaction logs for changing the source code database. This even makes the system more powerful, flexible, and robust thank traditional text files.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The biggest argument against this is future proofing development. Even if your tools change and/or are lost, plain text will live on. Your special formatting or behind the scenes gymnastics to make the text look okay, may not.

</comment><comment><USER12> IMO the best practical compromise is:

1\. Edit it with an IDE that supports soft-tabs.

2\. Save the actual text-file with spaces, for explicit positioning and uniform appearance.

</comment><comment><USER13> Just use tabs :p

<comment><USER14> Yeah.

And conversely, if anyone makes the argument of "How to Solve Spaces vs. Tabs Forever", tell them to just use spaces. Problems solved!

If only we could.</comment></comment>


"Hacking is a job … people train their entire childhoods … for …" - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/hacks4pancakes/status/768850647890264064 <comment><AUTHOR> Repeating full text of the tweet here:

"Hacking is a job that many people train their entire childhoods and young adulthood for. I can't think of a ton of other fields like that."

<comment><USER2> How about:

\- Scientific researchers, including mathematicians (lots of kids who are interested in math or science start studying and experimenting at an early age)

\- Musicians

\- Professional athletes

\- Writers and artists (many start at an early age)

\- Actors (lots of actors start working professionally as kids)

Also, you can certainly become a hacker _without_ devoting your youth to it. It's definitely possible to become a hacker when you're middle aged, and in 5-10 years someone with aptitude can become a very good hacker and have a long career ahead of them. It's much harder to start a career in professional sports in middle age.</comment></comment>


Educating the Chinese for Security - <AUTHOR> https://blog.forret.com/2019/12/24/educating-the-chinese-for-security/ <comment><AUTHOR> " _So I will educate any Chinese visitors on this domestic humanitarian issue, probably soon get banned by the Great Chinese Firewall, and as such also improve my website's security, since I will be banned for Chinese hackers too._ "

Using geolocation and Google Translate for protest and security.</comment>


Gondor is Coming to Australasia - <AUTHOR> https://gondor.io/au/

<comment><USER2> Rape expensive. I can see you have applied the Australia Tax to your pricing.

</comment><comment><USER3> Australasia? Really?</comment>


Training a deep belief network on a GPU with 100 million free parameters - <AUTHOR> http://ai.stanford.edu/~ang/papers/icml09-LargeScaleUnsupervisedDeepLearningGPU.pdf

<comment><USER2> Just to summarize:

"Deep learning" is the new big trend in Machine Learning. It promises general, powerful, and fast machine learning, moving us one step closer to AI.

An algorithm is deep if the input is passed through several non-linearities before being output. Most modern learning algorithms (including decision trees and SVMs and naive bayes) are "shallow".

For intuition, imagine if I told you that your main routine can call subroutines, and your subroutines could call subsubroutines, but you couldn't have any more abstraction than that. You can't have subsubsubroutines in your "shallow" program. You could compute whatever you wanted in a "shallow" program, but your code would involve a lot of duplicated code and would not be as compact as it should be. Similarly, a shallow machine learning architecture would involve a lot of duplication of effort to express things that a deep architecture could more compactly. The point being, a deep architecture can more gracefully reuse previous computations.

Deep learning is motivated by intuition, theoretical arguments from circuit theory, empirical results, and current knowledge of neuroscience. Here is a video where I give a high-level talk on deep learning, and describe this intuition: [http://bilconference.com/videos/deep-learning-artificial- int...](http://bilconference.com/videos/deep-learning-artificial-intelligence- joseph-turian/)

Here is more detailed information about deep learning: <http://deeplearning.net/tutorial/>

Deep learning techniques can typically be expressed as dense matrix operations, making them suitable to being sped up using GPUs. Which makes deep learning even more powerful.

<comment><USER3> Since you seem to know this stuff, I hope you doing mind if I ask you a marginally related question... It seems like deep learning is based on greedily building representations in an unsupervised setting. (Not sure if this is a defining characteristic of deep learning or just a common usage.) The postulate seems to be that greedily learning in a _supervised_ setting is inferior. Why should this be so? Is there any justification (theoretical or experimental)? I can only find vague asides on this point in a few papers.

<comment><USER4> It's not by any means required to be unsupervised, they just tend to be better suited for it, from what I remember. You can train a deep neural network just like a shallow one, but do you _know_ you're training it in the best way? The unsupervised one might key in on something you're not aware of.

They are also more capable of dealing with tons of variables (in this case, ~100 million). If you had 100 million yes/no values that needed to be checked, could you really answer all of them accurately? In some cases, sure, but not many, and what's the correct number of variables for simulating a language, and what do they relate to? An unsupervised network will try to fit them automagically, rather than taking your word for it.

Unsupervised learning also poses a lot of intelligence-modeling uses, because _we're_ essentially unsupervised for some of the "hardest" tasks to learn. Especially prior to learning to speak. All there really is for feedback is pain, and that doesn't necessarily lead directly to language.

But bravura should be able to answer better / more accurately; hopefully they'll chime in too. I'd like to know if there's more to it than what I know, which is pretty minimal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're planning to implement some of the ideas from this paper, check out the open source CUDAmat library for Python:

<http://code.google.com/p/cudamat/>

<comment><USER2> Better yet, try out Theano, which allows you to write numpy-like math equations that get automatically compiled and optimized and then target the GPU:

<http://deeplearning.net/software/theano/>

<comment><USER6> Theano is really cool. It is a lot more ambitious than CUDAMat, but cudamat might be easier to get started with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Really nice paper.

In the 1980s at SAIC, we spent a small fortune designing custom (Harvard memory architecture) hardware to do back-prop neural networks relatively fast, but fast back then was about 23m/sec FP operations. My droid phone could probably do more than that now :-)

</comment><comment><USER8> It would be nice when you link to a PDF to say so in the title ...

<comment><USER9> All pdf links on Hacker News automatically get the [scribd] link attached, so that's your PDF indicator.

<comment><USER8> Whoever put that together, well, I hope I never have to maintain their code, because it's clear they're the type who document for themselves.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why is Tinder an app? - <AUTHOR> Why not a website? What's the advantage in having it be an app?
And do you see potentially new social networks platforms being delivered as mobile apps in the future as well?
EDIT: another possibly related question: We know that huge userbases by themselves are valuable. Is it possible that mobile userbases are for some reason more valuable (more data  mining potential?) than web userbases (assuming the same demographics)? <comment><USER2> I have never met anyone from the Tinder team, but I would guess at the following influences:

1) Tinder was initially released in 2012. The javascript ecosystem has changed immensely in the past 4 years.

2) If I re-open a URL in google chrome on my iphone, I have to wait for the page to refresh. With an app, I don't.

3) The program model expressed by the CSS+HTML API is so complex that after 10 years, I have given up trying learn a mental model of it which can accurately predict reality. I have accepted that web interface development involves a great deal of guess-and-check. Apparently the APIs exposed by the Android and iPhone are much more coherently designed.

4) To open a webpage, you first have to click an icon to open a browser, then type in the first few characters of a URL. To open an app, you just have to click an icon. That makes it easier for someone to get into the habit of checking your app.

(If you can point out ways in which #2, #3 #4 are false, I would love to hear them. However, that won't weaken my argument because OP isn't asking about reality but rather is asking about the perceptions of the Tinder team.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think a better question is "why isn't it a website _as well_?" IMO the form factor of a phone is ideal for the UX that Tinder is offering. It presents dating like a game: a time waster. It just so happens our smart phones are designed to support just such interactions.

</comment><comment><USER4> Because with the app, they can harvest these valuable commodities:

Device and app history

Identity

Location

Photos

Media

Files

Camera access

WiFi info

Device ID

Call information

The above makes it far easier to productize you.

<comment><USER5> This. Also my generation lives on the tiny screen.Also, making it into a website would just make it feel like "real online dating" and completely remove it from the "i'm doing it just for fun" experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Tinder is not a social network.

I think DrScump said it well with the device stuff. It is also extremely satisfying to swipe in the app. As well as the literally always in your pocket aspect. An app goes on your homescreen as well, so it is in your face as well, kinda.

</comment><comment><USER7> no one would tinder on a desktop...thats what craigslist is for

</comment><comment><USER8> Push notifications</comment>


Swift Foundations for iBeacon Technology - <AUTHOR> http://makeandbuild.com/ibeaconswift/

<comment><AUTHOR> GitHub repo [https://github.com/makeandbuild/ibeaconSearch](https://github.com/makeandbuild/ibeaconSearch)

I've been experimenting a lot in this area but this is one of the first examples I've seen of using Swift to interact with iBeacons.</comment>


The Race for a Zika Vaccine - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/22/the-race-for-a-zika-vaccine <comment><USER2> _[National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony] Fauci is frustrated that Congress still hasn't authorized emergency funds for the Zika effort. (President Obama requested $1.9 billion in February.) "We have had to borrow money from other accounts to get our work started," Fauci said._

This is an epidemic. Why hasn't Congress acted?

<comment><USER3> The republicans tacked defunding planned parenthood and the ACA onto the Zika funding bill. Political grandstanding is more important than public health in 2016.

[http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/us/politics/congress- zi...](http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/06/29/us/politics/congress-zika- funding.html?_r=0&referer=https://duckduckgo.com/)

<comment><USER4> If anything, Zika and Planned Parenthood (ie, the US's quasi-governmental abortion agency) seem like two great tastes that go great together.

<comment><USER5> I would vote for the person that would make an official us abortion program. They would be a public hero to women in need.

<comment><USER5> To the downvoters: Maybe the problem isn't that you hate government, but that you hate women.

<comment><USER6> Not saying I agree with them, but you should recognize that many 'pro-life' people would argue that you possibly hate babies (well, soon-to-be-babies).

<comment><USER5> Fetuses aren't sentient for at least six months. Before that, who cares. I'll tell you who, christers that want to control women.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > _foreign contagions brought into the country can spread like, well, > rabbits._

> _is caused by a mosquito-borne virus_

I think it is just question of time, until some countries decide to eradicate mosquitoes on their territory. Seems like cheaper solution than vaccinate entire population against dozens (if not hundreds) diseases.

<comment><USER8> Yeah seriously. Eradicating mosquitoes would be vastly cheaper, save millions of lives, and improve quality of life everywhere. What good have mosquitoes ever done?

One plausible way to do this would be to engineer a male mosquitoes that can only produce male offspring. Eventually the female population would be reduced to 0.

<comment><USER9> Mosquitoes are the main food source of some animals, which leads them to die out. Then those animals are the food source of other animals, etc. etc..

Also, the male mosquitoes also pollenate some plants and flowers, which also negatively affects the ecosystem- only the females bite.

<comment><USER10> > Mosquitoes are the main food source of some animals, which leads them to die > out. Then those animals are the food source of other animals, etc. etc..

Actually, several biologists believe the impact would be minimal, or even beneficial:

"Yet in many cases, scientists acknowledge that the ecological scar left by a missing mosquito would heal quickly as the niche was filled by other organisms. Life would continue as before — or even better."

[http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html](http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100721/full/466432a.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Zika is a close cousin to the Dengue virus so good luck, people have been working on a Dengue vaccine forever.

<comment><USER12> If you read the article, there are a number of characteristics of Zika that make it a lot easier to vaccinate against. Also, apparently they _do_ have vaccines against some strains of Dengue.

<comment><USER11> Why do you assume I didn't read it? There is currently no effective vaccine for Dengue, I don't know why they classify their work as "very successful" (well you can call it very successful to previous attempts at vaccination against Dengue but it's not the Polio vaccine, not even close) but there are currently only a few vaccine candidates.

The closest thing we have currently to a working vaccine is Dengvaxia[0] which has an efficacy (should not be confused with vaccine effectiveness, there are many more factors that could affect effectiveness in the end including mutation rates CYD-TDV has only had a few trials and it's a very new vaccine) of about 50% (slightly higher with adults) this isn't what most people in the west consider a "vaccine".

[http://www.who.int/immunization/research/development/dengue_...](http://www.who.int/immunization/research/development/dengue_q_and_a/en/)

One should also note that while some countries have approved Dengvaxia or another vaccine for the most part all of them are still medical trials (phase 1-3).

The point I was trying to make and the article somewhat glossed over is that while vaccination attempts are good, mosquito control and safe sex are going to be still considerably more effective. Mosquito control will be a problem in the US, NIMBY and conspiracy nutcases are just going to love man in white overalls going around spraying stuffs but that's pretty much the most effective way of dealing with Zika.

While the Mosquitos do spread they creep rather than migrate, they rarely travel more than 500 meters (unless they piggyback on something) from where they hatched so spraying, controlling exposed water sources and using biological pest control (spreading sterile mosquitoes and biological larvicide) works pretty darn well. Zika also spreads through sperm so treating it like an STD also is pretty effective a fairly substantial number of cases was reported due to sexual transmission and condoms are pretty darn cheap and effective at stopping it and plenty of other things along the way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Any word on whether Madagascar has closed its ports yet?

<comment><USER14> Not yet, there's still hope for this game...</comment></comment>


OpenAI API - <AUTHOR> https://openai.com/blog/openai-api/ <comment><USER2> very interesting blog, unfortunately it is just a sort of beta. It would be nice if they would also show what it could do precisely.</comment>


Is it the end of the oil age? Power in the 21st century. - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/09/17/is-it-the-end-of-the-oil-age <comment><USER2> Making claims such as "... decarbonising energy will avoid the chaos of unchecked climate change ..." is disingenuous given the inertia (politically and physically) of current fossil fuel use. Some would argue that the damage has already proceeded beyond human control and we (or the next generation) is in for a wild ride.</comment>


Mob Protests in Germany Show New Strength of the Far Right - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/world/europe/germany-neo-nazi-protests-chemnitz.html <comment><USER2> Politicians and police have simply done absolutely nothing but ignore problems and spread lies instead.

The laws that we put in place have also been ignored. People that have been confirmed to be extremely dangerous have been allowed to enter the country (Sami A.)

Others have been allowed to stay despite entering the country illegally and being criminal.

The government put in extra effort to bring child murderers back into the country.(Ali bashir)

Government Tv station decides not to report on the murder of a doctor.

Whatever it has been about before. Most of the anger now comes from the states inability or unwillingness to do anything.

What is the government good for if it simply fails to enforce its own laws?

</comment><comment><USER3> The only thing I learnt from this story is the NYTimes has no idea what's happening in Germany.</comment>


Ask HN: When will refurbished 16gb iPad 1st gen be avail from Apple? - <AUTHOR>

http://store.apple.com/us/product/FB292LL/A <comment><USER2> Early December.</comment>


Chartbeat raises $9.5 million to measure the real time web - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/04/16/chartbeat-raises-9-5-million-dfj-realtime/

<comment><USER2> I sometimes wonder about the value of real-time analytics. I use Google Analytics real-time, and it can be extremely addictive watching visitors arriving, navigating, hoping you'll get a conversion, looking at how they found you.

But does it really add anything over none-real time analytics? Much healthier to check your reports once a week or so I would think.

I often think its just another distraction (like checking email or HN) that can moves focus from what I really should be doing.

Though I'd love to hear what uses people have found for real time analytics...

<comment><USER3> Look at their marketing. It's for publishers. Testimonials from Al Jazeera, Fox News and Fast Company. The value in real-time analytics for them is clear -- they're micromanaging their daily page view numbers by seeing what news of the day is attracting the most eyeballs from what sources, moving those stories up on their front page and expanding them, writing more about those topics, etc.

<comment><USER4> It's depressing news has become something where the story that gets eyeballs is more important than the story that needs telling. I understand WHY it's this way due to how marketing dollars play out, but it's still depressing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am having a really hard time comparing all the available traffic analyzers; I had my eyes set on Gauges (<http://get.gaug.es>) because of its pristine look compared to the unholy mess of Google Analytics, but maybe there are better or equally-good alternatives out there.

How do you compare the tools available out there, as long as one of your main parameters are design/UX?

It feels like there are as many traffic analyzers as there are to-do apps for iOS.

<comment><USER6> Give <http://getclicky.com/> a shot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great dashboard facelift too. I've been following one of their designers on Dribbble for a while now, and his has been consistently hitting the style and usability nail on the head.

(edit) This guy - <http://dribbble.com/mattbango>

</comment><comment><USER8> Chartbeat is like playing video games.

This tool is a must for every site owner and highly addictive.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've used Chartbeat at both, my last and current jobs. It's really invaluable for immediate feedback.

I went by their headquarters last week, and they're a quality team doing really good work. They've got some great new ideas that I hope this funding helps them produce.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been using charbeat for a long time and all I can say is: I love it. I really do. The insights I get are priceless.

The only downside is that sometimes I spend too much time watching it instead of writing code.

<comment><USER11> What kind of information are you using from it? And, how does it help you in your business?

<comment><USER10> I don't have a proper business per se, but I do make a living from a puzzles (flash and javascript games) site with adsense.

I use the API to see what games are trending right now, and use that to order the games on various "listings". That way, new and cool stuff are always on top.

I can also see exactly what times most people get on the website, and I use that information to send newsletters(and posts social media) on what I think is the best time.

I see what games are more engaging and I can focus on them, writing more features or simply promoting them better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wonder how the introduction of Google Analytics' Real-Time beta has affected their business. While it doesn't have all of the social features that Chartbeat does, it does cover a lot of their ground.

<comment><USER8> How do I get it? Is there a link inside GA?

<comment><USER2> Go to Home on the top tab, and you should see real time options on the left hand menu

<comment><USER8> Looks nice and there's a difference in concurrent visitors of 50% compared to Chartbeat, anyone knows why??

<comment><USER13> Google only receives pings on the page load so it then assumes that each visitor is there for five minutes to get its measurement of concurrents. Chartbeat is being pinged every few seconds so we can tell if someone is really there or not. The infographic I linked to above explains it better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Does chartbeat not publish their pricing? I'm trying to check what they'd charge us but I don't see anything.

<comment><USER15> My name's Doug and I actually work over at Chartbeat. You can get a breakdown of our pricing at chartbeat.com/plansandpricing. Any other questions, feel free to shoot me an e-mail at firstname.lastname@example.com.

<comment><USER14> Thanks!</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: FocusGroupIt – The "SurveyMonkey of focus groups" - <AUTHOR> https://www.focusgroupit.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN - Matt from FocusGroupIt here. Would love to hear feedback from the general HN community, and especially from Kevin Hale @ YC given his background in the survey software market at Wufoo and SurveyMonkey.

A direct link to sign up and participate in a demo focus group is here: [https://focusgroupit.com/groups/cf966c0e](https://focusgroupit.com/groups/cf966c0e)

<comment><USER2> hey are there options to make the feedback someone gives private?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. You can set any topic to "private," which prevents the participants from see what each other wrote for that topic. You can also set a group to be completely anonymous, which will assign a random username to each participant and no one (not even the moderator or observers) will be able to tell who the participants are.

<comment><AUTHOR> I should add... Participants can also mark their individual replies as "private" if they aren't comfortable sharing something broadly with the focus group.

<comment><USER2> IMO I would add that (depending on dev time) I guess I should have asked if I was to participate could every action be anonymous.

Do you think this could be used in an academic setting like research studies?

<comment><USER2> makes sense. well ill keep playing with it, hopefully with more people to learn more about it.

if you have 6mins sometime let me know what you think about my project :) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10062700](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10062700)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


50% nature, 50% nurture is wrong - <AUTHOR> http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/16/non-shared-environment-doesnt-just-mean-schools-and-peers/ <comment><USER2> As far as I can tell this article is just a bunch of ways that a "nonshared environment" is in fact a "nonshared environment" followed by some reckons.</comment>


[show HN] send websites and apps from browser to phone - <AUTHOR> http://pushmobileapp.com

<comment><USER2> very well done. I like the mini demo too.

Where do you see a revenue stream?</comment>


Semantic image synthesis and learning a generative model from a single image - <AUTHOR> https://theaisummer.com/gan-computer-vision-semantic-synthesis/ <comment><USER2> [http://nvidia-research-mingyuliu.com/gaugan/](http://nvidia-research- mingyuliu.com/gaugan/)

The demo is fun! Thanks for sharing!

<comment><USER3> The demo is fun, and I got some very groovy results. However, the UI is very difficult to navigate, even for a demo. In all computer engineering schools, there should be compulsory UI design class.</comment></comment>


Going for a trot on the Django pony - <AUTHOR> http://blog.fluther.com/going-for-a-trot-on-the-django-pony/

<comment><USER2> One of the poster's "cons" was lack of support for multiple databases.

Django 1.2 will have support for multiple databases: <http://djangoadvent.com/1.2/multiple-database-support/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm excited for that but what I really meant was split/sharded databases, something you need at scale (which Fluther doesn't need...yet). Correct me if I'm wrong but the upcoming multiple database support can't do that.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shard_(database_architecture)>

What it seems to support is "Database Routers" which let you implement your own sharding. It's not that you can't do it. It's just that it doesn't support sharding out of the box.

I'm more excited for the template performance improvements.

<comment><USER3> I can't find a reference to it, but I recall one of the developers mentioning that the current multi-db support lays the ground work necessary for sharding.

I would bet that once 1.2 is released at least several reusable apps pop up that implement various sharding/partitioning strategies.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the sense I get—that they are laying the framework for more advanced database functionality like sharding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A little off-topic, but I love the design and typography on the Fluther blog!

<comment><AUTHOR> Our designer (<http://www.davidcole.me/>) is awesome. We'll let him know you love it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Split database support is in Django 1.2 (currently in beta), so that's one con to scratch off the list.</comment>


Ask HN: What does the Twitter/Datasift deal mean for developers? - <AUTHOR>

So, I write for ReadWriteWeb and I've been paying pretty close attention lately to the situation with Twitter, API access, the API Terms of Service and the developer ecosystem. Earlier this week, Twitter announced a deal with DataSift (formerly TweetMeme) to sell access to Twitter info (including historical) at a price much lower than the full firehose access offered with Gnip. The access is based on search, comes with extra data from Klout, PeerIndex, Qwerly and Lexalytics.<p>(Here's our writeup of the announcement too: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_announces_fire_hose_marketplace_up_to_10k.php )<p>So, I'm looking for reactions and interpretation from developers on what this means for the Twitter developer ecosystem. Got one? Got some insight? Let's talk! <comment><AUTHOR> Oh, and I'm Mike. My email is firstname.lastname@example.com if you don't want to just comment here. If you are willing to be quoted for a story, I'll need to know your full name and position/job title/company, what have you. :)

</comment><comment><USER2> Mike -- Your statement is factually false. Both DataSift and Gnip have two components of the cost they charge consumers for their search-based products. The first is a data license cost (10 cents per thousand tweets sent to the consumer) and a processing cost. In the case of Gnip, the processing cost is essentially the cost of the machine you license, while for DataSift it is the AWS-style compute cost. How they show these costs to the consumer may vary, but they are each compensate Twitter for the cost of the data license.

To simplify:

<total cost> = <data cost> \+ <processing cost>

<total cost> = <$0.10 * #tweets % 1000> \+ <processing cost levied by Gnip or DataSift>

Thanks, Doug

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> BTW - Here are some stories from earlier this year for context:

[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_puts_the_smack_...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_puts_the_smack_down_on_another_popular_app.php) [http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_kills_the_api_w...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_kills_the_api_whitelist_what_it_means_for.php)

</comment><comment><USER3> check your facts by reaching out to Twitter directly.

I'm Jud Valeski, CEO of Gnip (email@example.com). So we're all running on factual data, apparently a problem these days,...

Twitter's value added resellers (e.g. Gnip and DataSift) must... \- sell filtered data at no less than $0.10/1k Tweets consumed. Gnip makes this price explicit, whereas DS, apparently (I can't fully tell so check w/ them directly) rolls that number into their costs, making it opaque.

\- sell only to firms who will not display the Tweets in "public".

\- sell only to firms who will not programmatically re-syndicate the raw Tweets further downstream.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Jud. I'll email you now. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My understanding is the primary difference is that data from Datasift is not for display (analysis only), which, if accurate, would only work for a small set of companies currently accessing the data.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure if that's true. Many of their use case examples seem to display the data from user's streams, meaning that it's not just analysis.

<comment><USER2> Hi -- The license the consumer receives is strictly for non-display use cases, meaning you are not able to go to Gnip or DataSift to license Twitter content to display to end users. We (Twitter) still maintain a robust set of APIs for display use cases which we will license directly to partners for display products.

Thanks, Doug</comment></comment></comment>


Tell YC: What are your financial strategies amidst this growing credit crunch / dragging economy? - <AUTHOR>

What are your current financial strategies or predictions given this souring economic state?
Being 22, I'm a bit new to fully comprehending economic slowdowns and curious how others have made the best of them.
Personally, I'm pissed that the government continues to bail-out corporations, however I'm mainly interested to hear your thoughts on what sort of business / investment opportunities might arise out of this downturn. <comment><USER2> It's a cycle mon ami. It will always happen.

IMHO you should get very good at trying to build a business. Indeed that's maybe why you're even reading in this aggregator anyway. Even when they fail, you learn quite a good lesson, and using people around you to help you leverage your talent will probably put you in a better position to withstand these economic downturns.

On the meantime, get acquainted with sound economic theory books, maybe even some accounting 101's and perhaps a refreshing metaphor wielding book (Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko maybe?) to help you get pumped up.

On a side note, it seems that economic downturns are favored by big investors to get undervalued assets into their portfolio (be it either paper, real estate or even businesses) for cheap. Indeed this seems to have been Buffet's strategy all along. Maybe we could learn from him, that a bearish environment, does not have to be the most caustic of ones.

You can succeed. Try not to speculate too much, go for fundamentals.

</comment><comment><USER3> here is a complete financial plan for you:

phase 1) pay down all your high interest debt. if you're paying more than 7-8% on something (i.e. a credit card), pay that shit down. you'll be hard pressed for the market to pay that much consistently, so you're best #1 investment is to pay that down first.

phase 2) build yourself an emergency fund. if you get fired, have a medical emergency, or whatever, you're going to need money. build up at least 3 months worth of living expenses. keep it in a high hield savings account (i use HSBC direct) so you're earning a solid 3+% on it. not too bad.

phase 3) take the bulk of your money and invest it in a diverse set of index funds that have low costs. i also suggest setting up a 401k or roth ira if you don't already have one and put most, if not all, of your investment money into one of these (for now, at least -- compound interest and long term investments work best when you start early). keep your money in here for the long term (10 years minimum) -- don't get scared over downs or excited over ups. over the long term, the market will produce an average of a 10% return (see [http://www.icmarc.org/xp/rc/marketview/chart/2006/20060714ti...](http://www.icmarc.org/xp/rc/marketview/chart/2006/20060714timetiming.html) for more info), and thats what you want. rebalance your portfolio twice a year. this is, essentially, autopilot investing.

phase 3.5) lather, rinse, repeat, in this order. if you get more debt that falls into phase 1, do phase 1. if your emergency fund doesn't fit into phase 2 anymore, feed it until it fits phase 2. and then always, like clockwork, be pumping more money into phase 3. feed it it like its one of your other bills.

phase 4) if you want some more risk, skim off some of your index fund money and invest it into a small smattering of individual stocks. i recommend dividend-paying stocks and REITs since, even if the price goes down, you're still earning a dividend. even though my portfolio stocks are negative, my individual stock portfolio as a whole is positive due to the dividends i get. but be wary -- investing in individual stocks can be a gamble if you don't know enough about what you're doing (and if you pick some of the "big" stocks to invest in, you're already investing in them via your index funds, most likely).

hope this helps. investing and doing well is easy. investing and doing better than "well" requires research time (which you could use on your startups), effort, and doesn't always work out.

<comment><USER4> _take the bulk of your money and invest it in a diverse set of index funds that have low costs_

And now, a very important note for those of you who are even younger than me: _The massive bear market is an incredible stroke of luck for you_.

(I didn't realize this back in 2000, and I paid the price. Don't make the same mistake I did.)

When you're young you don't need immediate profit from your investments. You have many years to sit on them. You want to buy low and sell high. When's the best time to buy low? When the market is crashing!

So now, more than ever, is the time to save, save, save. Earn money and invest it. Live cheaply and save. Buy stocks with a portion of your savings. Buy them while everyone else is selling them, and take time now and then to bless the universe for giving you a 25% (and counting!) drop in the S&P500 over the last year. No matter whether stocks are overvalued or undervalued, buying them at a 25% discount from what they used to be is a good thing.

Of course, those of us who already have some stocks have a mixed blessing: The portfolio value is collapsing, but there's also a chance to buy more at fire- sale prices. And those who happen to be baby boomers are totally screwed, because they have to retire _tomorrow_ and their savings -- even if they happened to have had any -- are rapidly vanishing at precisely the wrong moment. So stock market crashes aren't all wine and roses for everyone. But, if you happen to be in your twenties, they're good news.

(For more details I recommend Bernstein's _The Four Pillars of Investing_. Sadly, it's clear to me now that every year that I didn't know about this book was costing me money.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Nice suggestions, noodle.

May I sugest a link that popped up just a moment ago? <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=307838>

Or if you want it direct, use: <http://marshallbrain.com/million.htm>

Very nice, down to earth advice, from the founder of HowStuffWorks.

Edit: Just found the edit link. Fixed the comment.</comment>


Fifty Developer Tools of 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://stackshare.io/posts/top-developer-tools-2018 <comment><USER2> Very bizarre...

Just reviewing some of the categories and runners up;

Application & Data Tool of the Year Javascript was pitted against frameworks made in Javascript? It was also judged against HTML5? Against Java? Against MSQL? All of these tools can (quite literally) be used in the same application, cleanly.

Advice for next time; If you're going to join the hordes of writers ranking technologies, research your categories better, and include some sort of metric that they are judged against, other than your own experience. Because some of these tools would be supremely useful over the winners, in the right environment.</comment>


Learnivore - <AUTHOR> https://learnivore.com/

<comment><USER2> Hi, I had just tried my luck at getting feedback from HN with my new service [https://fluxcards.de](https://fluxcards.de)

You are hiring but you say it's completely free for both sides of the deal? How do you plan to monetize on this if I may ask?

You focus on real world encounters and usually this means that hitting critical mass is hard to do. Do you market to a certain city or is teaching to a global audience (via Skype for example) a more realistic first step?

Lastly would you be interested in cooperating? I have 11k active users (200 daily active) in my Android app and the web version was just released as open beta but I would love to offer my users real teachers via Skype and could see some synergies if you don't intend to tab into flashcards spaced repetition learning.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN community,

I am submitting this relatively new site for your critique, visibility, and possible interest! Learnivore is a free to use marketplace connecting instructors with students. It is 100% free to use. We don't charge for using our services as a platform for people to advertise their knowledge and skills or for people seeking instructors, tutors, and coaches. I would love to know what you think about it! Thank you for your time :)</comment>


Daily UI: Become a better designer in 100 days - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailyui.co <comment><USER2> Not enough info on the site to make it compelling.</comment>


Ask HN: Side Projects While Employed? - <AUTHOR> What is the best way to have your employer acknowledge your side project? Is it worth going through compliance or does it complicate things for no good reason?<p>Are all encompassing contract clauses enforceable (in Europe or the USA) at all if you work on completely unrelated things in your freetime? <comment><USER2> These are enforceable but frequently not enforced. If you started a billion dollar company they might sue for some of it, but you started a billion dollar company so there.</comment>